


The weapon remembers

by pushdragon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 48 hours in bed in Wakanda, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Cryofreeze (Marvel), False Memories, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-16 13:03:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20818517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: The Winter Soldier finds old fantasies of Steve in his memory, and takes them for reality.He's got two days to sort out all his mixed-up history, before he puts himself back in cryo freeze. Harder still, he's got to convince Steve to let him do it.





	1. Chapter 1

The soldier gets into the vehicle when they prod him with their rifle butts, and lets them fasten the restraints around his wrists and ankles, fit the cross bars tight over his chest. In his peripheral vision, Steve had let them put some kind of heavy duty manacles on him, too. He'd looked sad, but not afraid, so the soldier decides to shelve the fight for now.

They pass through the wreckage his pursuit left in the road tunnel and head for the highway, going west toward the airport. The transparent body of the cage he's in is meant to be humiliating, maybe, but a trifling emotion like that barely registers against the strategic value of clear sight lines. He catalogs assets and vulnerabilities, risks and opportunities. His first problem is confinement; second is hostile combatants; third is location. Where there's a problem, his job is to find a solution, so he thinks ahead.

It's not unfamiliar, this feeling. He'll be taken some place behind thick walls, some place natural light never reaches. People will do things to him, whether he wants them to or not. Probably there'll be pain; if there is, he'll breathe when he can, and scream when he can, and eventually it will be over. There might be orders afterwards. There could be an end to it all. There won't be rest; there never is.

He lightly tests one of the cuffs. It holds like its designers meant it for a man with one metal arm, though he thinks he could probably break it if he needed to. The only thing that's different now is the drilling, insistent thought that it doesn't have to be this way. And that makes it worse, not better. 

He thinks he'd remember if he'd been in Vienna. The past is more gaps than substance, but from what he remembers, his methods are direct and the imprecise carnage of concealed explosives is not the kind of workmanship he prefers. These last two years he's been trying to build the wreckage in his mind into something like a human memory, but the materials are too weak and shattered. Sometimes he thinks it might come back, when the crunch of an apple in his mouth, or the stiff weight of a hat, trigger a reaction deep in his muscles where perhaps the poisons in his blood didn't all reach. 

The worst thing is they took his pack, with all its carefully curated contents: the knives that fit his grip like new fingers, the postcards of old movies, the black combat suit, the American cigarettes with the smell that's like a door about to open. And the laminated card he stole from the museum, with the photographs he can't stop looking at, once he lets himself start.

He sleeps on the way to the airport, so he'll be ready to track the flight path and the route at the other end. He doesn't waste energy on anxiety or fear. There are only two possible outcomes: he'll either get through what happens next, or he won't. In his head, he repeats the name Bucky Barnes, because it used to mean something once, and that makes it an asset he can use. He hasn't been able to make himself believe he could be that person. Not until today, when his hand had slid the knife back into his pocket before his mind even had a chance to make a decision, leaving him alone with an intruder in his room and armed with nothing more than a bag of groceries.

He's right, the interrogation room is like a tomb, deep underground, somewhere near the Spree River, close enough to make the Russian border if he can get air transport and a good head start. Though he hasn't seen Steve since they pulled up in the loading bay, he has a sense that he's not far away, watching. 

Bucky Barnes, he repeats in his head, as if he could force his way into the name like an airship and rise up out of this prison.

The head doctor says, "Tell me, Bucky. You've seen a great deal, haven't you?"

"I don't wanna talk about it," he replies, because just then it seems as if it would be the worst thing in the world to have to hear out loud the details of the things he's done. 

And then the doctor is saying the trigger words, and Bucky Barnes dies all over again.

_______

He's wet. It's dark. He's in a moving vehicle. Steve.

His head is fuzzy. The recent past is a blur, but he knows it will come back to him later, glimpses of brutality opening like pit traps in his mind.

He twists his wrists carefully and finds he's not restrained. The hard plastic casing against his shoulder tells him they're in the back of a van. Steve's behind him, he's propped up between Steve's knee and the wall, which is lucky because it feels like he's had his lungs full of water, and that seems like something that happened, a helicopter flying the wrong way, down, and he was so tired he didn't care that it was all about to end in water, just like it started. 

He blinks away that memory – the doctor's white face, the lights, the metal arm. Waking up is the worst of it, since he stopped waking up to orders. Everything's a jumble of impressions and emotions so vivid he has to imagine putting them behind a wall in his mind, brick by brick, before the pain goes away and he can breathe again. 

"You're okay," Steve says to him in his low, careful voice. "We're taking you somewhere you'll be safe."

They're on the city outskirts, judging by the turning and the speed. Apart from two small lights by the door, it's dark. In his memory, the woman with the red hair, she's saying something, something he doesn't want to hear as his metal hand tightens around her throat. Did he hear bone snap, before they knocked him away?

"Bucky?"

"There's a facility in Adlershof," he grates out. "Old armaments factory. The Stasi used it for interrogations, sometimes, experiments. It'll hold anything." 

"Bucky."

Sometimes the person he was is so close he can almost reach out and take hold of it, but it's inside him, unreachable. That one melancholy word brings too much to the surface. Sitting on a wall in Brooklyn, tin can in his hand holding blackberries from the ruined lot behind, Steve's face pretending they were sweeter than they were. A campfire in the mountains, night before a mission, laughter in the little cavern, Steve's hands swiftly checking the bolt and chamber of his rifle, handing it back with a look that made his throat tight.

"Tell me how I can help you," Steve says.

But although he can list off the contents of his armory in seconds, down to the precise tally of ammunition, the things he needs to say now are as shapeless in his mouth as they are in his head. He's a sentient weapon whose usefulness has consisted of binaries: problem/solution; task/action. He can strategize ten steps ahead when it comes to outsmarting a security system or throwing off a pursuit, but he doesn't have an answer to this one question. Where would he find the vocabulary? It's been a long time since anyone took an interest in finding out how he felt about something. 

Something about their proximity stirs up a memory in him though. A mild night in Austria, late in the war. Sleeping in a concrete storeroom, kit bags under their heads for pillows. Steve against the far wall, moonlight from the window illuminating a strip from his throat to his nose. Bucky's fingers tracing that skin, bending down, his mouth, Steve rolling towards him, reaching out and Bucky reaching back with every cell in his body.

His good hand finds Steve's knee and grasps, sliding down hard to where his legs join. Closing his eyes, he thinks of Steve's mouth, the sudden heat of it, squeezes the wet denim over flesh, and he's almost in his old skin, so close, when there's a tight grip on his wrist yanking him away, not pulling him in.

"No." He sounds more shocked than the times Bucky had shot at him. "Bucky, what did they do to you?"

The note of grief tells him that Steve is thinking they degraded him in some way worse than all the daily indignities of slavery, of being treated like a man-shaped weapon and packed away in storage between missions. But that kind of thinking drags him back, not forward, so he jerks his wrist free and reaches again, feeling for the reaction his hand remembers so well. 

Steve's forearm comes across his neck, forcing his head back, cutting off his air supply. His strong arm's jammed up against the wall, no angle to swing in and he starts to struggle, but Steve's grip is unyielding and all that thrashing is pointless against the strength of his chest and legs. He lets himself go limp, lets it happen.

"Sorry Buck." He hears that soft voice in his ear as it all drains away to blackness.

_______

When he opens his eyes again, his head hurts and Steve is gone. His arm is in an industrial press, in the armaments factory. The sounds of an aerial search come distantly from outside. The guy who wears the wings looks at him distastefully and calls out.

Just for a second, the change takes his breath away, when Steve steps back into the room. It's like a blindfold has come off. Out of uniform, Steve is tall and straight and clean, and all he can remember is the hot pulse under his jaw and the tenderness of his mouth and a wanting so deep he could never find the bottom of it. 

"Which Bucky am I talking to?" Steve asks, cool as anything, so he shoves all those feelings down and tries to use them as a bridge to a simpler time. He digs among the fragments from the museum and the swamp of his memory.

"Your mom's name was Sarah," he says. A memory comes up, not one of the old ones he's examined so many times they've grown bleached like curtains in sunlight, but a new one, spontaneous and so fresh it makes him laugh. "You used to wear newspapers in your shoes."

And then they're reconstructing the last few hours, together, unraveling the plot against him, and it's familiar, the way he rises to his best for Steve, the way Steve expects him to, the way Steve accepts nothing less. It's so familiar that being Bucky Barnes feels less and less like pretending. He lets them release him from the press, and his memory turns concrete for once as he spills out fact after fact about the Siberia base, about the work they did there, everything he can remember.

After it all, the wing man goes outside to call in a bigger team.

It's the first time they've been together with time on their side. Steve is still backed up against the wall, keeping a deliberate distance between them.

"You got yourself together now?" 

Bucky knows what he's getting at. He can't stop his jaw coming up, defensive.

"You want me to keep it quiet, I can do that. Just don't treat me like an idiot. There's a lot of things I've lost, but I remember about us. I remember that."

Steve's arms uncross, like he's trying to show openness. 

"You're my friend, Bucky. Always were. But it wasn't – it's never been more than that."

He breathes in quick like he thinks he might have more to say, but anger hits Bucky in a blaze, like that one lie ignites an oil drum of jumbled memories and two years' frustration. 

"You think I don't remember that air base outside Trieste? The one with the bunk room behind the radio tower. What about that?"

"What about it? The pickup was a day late. We took a swim in the river and you found a drawer full of tactical maps."

Bucky watches his fist clench, listening for the satisfying creak of the plates grinding together. 

"That's not all we – All right, on the road to Graz then. There was a storeroom in a bombed out church, the whole place smelled sweet from a shot-out barrel of altar wine. What I remember from that night, it was more than friendly."

There's a long silence. 

"Oh, Buck," Steve says, sad, sadder than before, even. "There were seven of us sleeping in that room together. Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened. Even if -" He looks down, lets an unhappy frown get the better of him for a moment. "I'm going to find every HYDRA base and burn it off the face of the earth for what they did to you."

There's another thing Bucky remembers. Early evening in Steve's flat, must have been those last few days before he shipped out to the war. Maybe that's a hallucination, too, but it feels so real, Steve's determined grip on his new tie, his fierce kisses and the sudden hesitation, the switch, and then they were hugging, a familiar gesture that would be charged differently for the few days that remained to them. 

He can't think what would be worse, to believe it never happened, or to believe Steve is ashamed enough to lie about it. He keeps that one to himself. 

Instead, he nods, hunched over, looking at the old stains on the concrete floor, and says, "Alright then. Let's start with Siberia."

_______

"Don't look at me that way," Steve says as he drives them away from the railway underpass, the recently returned shield wedged down behind his seat.

Sam grins, "Only you, man. Only you could turn a hundred tons of structural concrete into romance. Look around you. Strategy's a thing you never heard of." 

Bucky meets his gaze in the rear view mirror and keeps looking at him the only way he knows how, which is most likely the same way he looked when receiving orders to bring down a building or pick up a live electrical wire. 

But he gets the point. The woman Steve kissed so sweetly was whole and healthy, and so young it makes his bones ache with the weight of years. Sam says she's an agent, and she's kind of got Peggy's line in steely and unflappable. Whatever he had once, with Steve, it was two different men who had it. 

Every problem has a solution. It may have been Steve who wrenched him out of HYDRA's power but there's got to be something else he can anchor himself to now, some other center of gravity for his dust cloud of memories. He can carry his own weight, if he's worth a place in the world. And if it turns out he can't, then he's not going back. 

_______

The quinjet is eerily quiet, like a lot of unpleasant places he's been kept in. But the mountains and all the empty landscape skirted around them give him a welcome sense of liberty.

_Why did you run?_ the king, T'Challa, had asked. Sometimes Bucky feels like all he knows how to do is kill, and fight, and run. It's one after the other, and in a few hours they'll be landing in Siberia, with five serum-enhanced super soldiers to take down, and less than half a team to do it with. 

Fighting side by side together, back at the airport, has only mixed him up more, because their battlefield timing is unnervingly synched and no matter what kind of assault he's fighting off, he knows Steve's location as instinctively as north. He's conscious of Steve's blind spots even more than his own; knows how Steve will turn and when he will strike, and where the weak points are that allow an opponent to put him down. He must have mistaken that for something else. 

Steve says it wasn't him, who did all those terrible things, but he remembers some of those things more accurately than he remembers the man he used to be before the war. How can he be Bucky Barnes if he's got it so wrong, about who Bucky used to be? 

"When we're done, I'm going to stay here. Work out some things." 

In the seat in front of him, Steve doesn't stop looking at the way ahead. "You're going to come back to New York, Buck. Work things out there, when the politics blows over."

"That right, is it? A nice life that'll be for you. Not being able to leave me alone for more than five minutes in case I turn back into a killing machine."

He can see Steve holding back, letting a few replies go by. "There are other people you can trust. You'll see."

It's clear he doesn't get it, what it was like for the soldier. How it wasn't logical persuasion that broke HYDRA's hold on him. It wasn't being told his old name that unlocked his mind like some secret code word, because his mind had been stripped away from him decades ago and used like a chalkboard. It was only when they were hand to hand on that faltering helicarrier, Steve unresisting under him, the shock of sudden surrender, the sound of his voice and the smell of his blood, that some instinct was triggered powerfully enough to override his programming, something muscle-deep in him that the worst HYDRA could do hadn't quite managed to extinguish. 

It's clear he doesn't get it, how hard it is to be Bucky Barnes when Steve isn't there to show him how. When he feels his control slipping and those bloody memories clutch at him like quicksand. 

"If the answer's anywhere, it's here. My history's in this place."

"Our friends are in New York."

"And that makes a lot of targets if you turn your back on me for one second. I work better on my own."

Steve actually abandons the controls to turn around in his seat.

"On your – Bucky, on your own is the one way you never worked. We had a team, back in the war, and you held it together more than any of us. You were the one we all counted on to watch out for us, and you never let us down. You never let us go into a fight alone." If Bucky was startled by the sound of Steve raising his voice, it's even more shocking when the heat drops out of it again, leaving him drained. "And before that, there was us. There was always us." 

Bucky looks back at him dumbly, thinking he hasn't got a spark of that person left in him, except for memories of things that never even happened. He looks down at his metal hand until he can't stand to look at it anymore. 

"I want to be that person," he says before he can stop himself. "The one who makes you look like … the way you look at me. But you gotta understand, they changed me, the things I did. You gotta see the worst in me, Steve, for once in your stupid life."

He can see Steve is about to ride right over that with a perfect demonstration of that exact flaw, making another pig-headed, head-in-the-clouds promise about how it's all going to be okay, so Bucky nods to their fore and says, "Watch that ridge there."

After the ridge is avoided, by a clearance of half a mile or more, it goes quiet enough that he can hope Steve is thinking about what he said. They're well into Russian airspace. The Urals are a grey blur on the horizon.

"You never seemed to be on your own, Buck. You were the one out with the girls – a new one each week and more than that sometimes. I was the one lying in bed, waiting for your key in the lock. You wanted to be part of everything. You wanted to be in the middle of a crowd. I was the one waiting for you." 

Steve adjusts their course and leans back, hands on his thighs. There's a memory emerging from the shadows deep in Bucky's mind but before it gets any shape to it, Steve goes on. "You remember that time we went to see the Ziegfeld girls, don't you? Fanny Brice in diamonds. That French lady doing the conga with bananas on her hips." 

He's about so say no when there's a glimpse of it, an impression of pink feathers and blinding sequins and the humid air of wet shoes in the hot theatre. 

"You were so shocked you had a coughing fit." Bucky's voice comes out hushed. "You nearly got us caught. We stole the band members' jackets to get in."

"Borrowed."

It's strange and sweet, the unfamiliar rumble that laughter makes in his throat. "I told you I was going to give them back. Didn't I?"

"If you didn't," Steve says, turning over his shoulder, light in his eyes, "don't tell me now."

It takes Bucky a while to notice that the mountains are behind them now. The sun sits low in the sky this time of year, tipping down into afternoon, pale through the clouds out the window. He looks at it until the imprint of it is blazing on his retina, leaving a little white comet trail in his vision as he stands up to get to the weapons lockers. 

_______

The base is just like he remembers: a brutal, heavy build that relies without any concession to economy on the thousands of tons of low-grade iron ore that cheap and expendable labor could dig out of the mountains. The whole place is like a metal fortress sunk down deep into the frozen earth. Iron ribs and beams that his powerful hand couldn't make a dent in seal them in with the five super soldiers they've come here to face. 

The elevator doors thud closed. For a second it's still, then they slowly descend, him and Steve in this cold place at the end of the world. It's like going off to war all over again. It has the feeling of a one-way trip.

"There's one thing I can't get out of my head," he says, soft voice carrying. "After Dolores, years after the Ziegfeld girls. It was the day I got my first set of orders, for Belfast." Beside him, he can feel Steve take a deep breath, let it out slow. "I was going out to meet some girl–"

"Gretchen."

"Yeah. My bag was packed – sitting on the chair. I was meeting her on Court Street. My hand was on the doorknob. And you pulled me back."

He remembers the suddenness of it, an outburst that took all of Steve's wiry strength to pull him in, one more shock on top of all the big changes, homeless, jobless, the war just a boat ride away. He remembers Steve's kisses hot on his mouth, his cheek, his jaw, an offer that vanished before Bucky had a chance to pull himself together and consider whether it was something he wanted. But he can tell by Steve's stillness beside him that he doesn't need to say that part. 

"You were shipping out at seven the next morning," Steve says, glancing at him quick and regretful. "Cancelled at the last minute. A transport was sunk off Greenland and the deployment was scratched before you ever got to the dock."

"You pulled me back. That happened." 

"Yeah."

"You meant that."

The elevator starts to slow up.

"I guess I did." 

_______

Everything feels wrong. There's no pain where his arm used to be, even HYDRA weren't sadistic enough to put nerves in that thing, but the missing weight of it badly unbalances him, and every one of Stark's blows had killing force behind it. 

They're back in the elevator. He's draped from Steve's shoulder, that firm grip on his wrist the only thing holding him off the ground. 

"Don't even start," Steve says in a voice too exhausted to manage levity. "I leave you here and Tony will finish you off, if he can fix his tech, or kill himself trying if he can't. No offence, pal. I'm overriding you on this one." 

He feels himself wilt inwards, temple coming to rest against Steve's shoulder, and then Steve's voice is getting urgent, saying, "Stay with me, Buck. You can't quit now." 

And Steve's hand is on the back of his neck, steadier than anything Bucky has known. It sets off something in him – something that started up before, leaving the quinjet, when Steve clapped him on the shoulder like old times, a gesture full of affection and unqualified trust. For a moment Bucky thinks it hurts worse than the damage from Stark's metal fists, the gentle way Steve is touching him. He closes his eyes and inhales the smell of him in short, tight-lunged breaths, and then the doors slide open and on the other side of them, out in the afternoon light, T'Challa is waiting, striding towards them.

It takes him half a second to read the situation. He's nothing but a liability right now, and apart from the places he's bleeding, Steve just left half his heart on the floor back there with his shield. Bucky's feet scrabble for purchase until he works up enough momentum to jerk himself clear. It's only when he catches himself against the wall with his good arm that he realizes he's got nothing else to fight with now. He feels Steve brush past him. 

"No. Steve. It's over. Steve!" 

He keeps on calling, because he's just seen it first-hand: Steve's blinding combination of nobility and humility draw people to him, but even the spell he casts isn't strong enough to protect him when he puts himself in front of Bucky and the things he's done.

"Steve."

He pushes back off the wall and staggers a few steps to get in front of him. It's not far, not far at all, just those few last steps. He feels calm, all of a sudden. The ghost of Steve's hand still tickles the back of his neck. 

"This is between you and me, right," Bucky says. "You leave him out of it." 

But T'Challa just stops and asks, "What do you need?"

He really needs the strength of Steve's grip under his elbow, just then. Steve, taking it all in his stride, or maybe just unsurprised to find the best in people, gets straight to business.

"The guy you're looking for is around here somewhere. Sokovian soldier with a vendetta. He's the one who –"

"Yes, we met," T'Challa says, sounding pleased with the outcome of that encounter. 

"Then Tony Stark needs your help." With a nod back to where they came from, they're moving forward towards their transport. "We'll make our own way."

Then they're out in the snow, in the silence. Bucky's heart makes him aware that it's still beating, much too fast.

"There is a place for you in Wakanda, if you need it," comes T'Challa's clear, resonant voice, following them. "Both of you."

_______

Bucky doesn't even make it to his seat. He collapses against a wall and finds a strap to hold him in place, and then, despite how hard he fights it, he passes out.

When he wakes, it's grey outside, console display lighting up Steve's grim expression as he flies. For a while, Bucky just watches him while he waits for the fog of his thoughts to settle, takes in the familiar clean lines of his face, the steadiness of him, and as he watches, a thread of memory pulls him slowly in. That kiss, that one kiss, he took it with him, puzzled, to the war, and there in the worst place in the world, when he found out what a body looked like after a close-up grenade blast, when entire battalions marched out whole and came back shredded to pieces, when HYDRA got him for the first time and strapped him to a table to pump him full of poison, it was one of the things he held on to, to keep himself alive. It was still in his head when Steve came back into his life, in this new body the same shape as his heart at last, and the wanting started soon after that, but too late because Peggy Carter had turned him invisible, and too late to save him from all those long nights of imagining, in Italy, down in Greece, across Austria, watching Steve guiltily through the day and, at night, doing in his dreams all the things he'd missed his chance to have in life.

Bucky knows he's got it straight now, in his head. He thinks he can stand up, and it turns out he's right about that too.

Steve's staring out at the greying landscape in front of them, cowl clutched in his hand, thoughts evidently far away.

"Stop it." He gets in behind the pilot chair so he can drop his good hand onto Steve's shoulder. "Whatever you're thinking you should have done different, you couldn't."

He hates the way Steve's head hangs down, because the one person he's known in his life who never deserves to feel ashamed is Steve.

"And me, I'm really glad you didn't." 

He squeezes, like he used to when Steve's shoulder was half the size, when it was just the two of them. Steve's hand comes up to clap over his, for a moment, and their eyes meet in reflection in the glass.

They fly silently back into Europe.

_______

They land at the old base on Mt Othrys, that the seven of them knocked out in the spring of '44. The roof on the hangar's half-collapsed, but it's high enough on the good side to squeeze the quinjet in there, not minding a bit of low level damage to the paint work. 

Steve runs a hand over his face and turns to him from the console. "What do you need? For that?" – nodding towards the ragged metal stump of Bucky's arm – "It's just a small town here but I can get to Athens if I have to."

Bucky is saying "There's a med-tech facility in Volos, closer to–" when he realizes. "You better restrain me before you go. There's gotta be some sort of high-powered cuffs on a ship like this, doesn't there?"

"There isn't," Steve says, weary enough that the lie shows. "And on top of that, no goddamn way. I saw you back there, with Tony. You came back when I told you to run. You think I didn't notice you had a perfect kill shot the whole time that video was playing? And you weren't the one I was worried about. I don't know why you can't see it. You're out of that place." 

"Yeah – _you_ pulled me out of that place. Are you listening this time? I've killed men on their knees, Steve, crushed their throats while they were begging for their lives. I've killed little kids. I wiped out anyone who got between me and my target. The worst times were when I didn't kill them. Sometimes they knew the information I needed, sometimes it turned out they didn't, and you think it must have ripped me apart to do these things, but it didn't. It was easy as one two three. Until you, on that mission in DC. You with your steady voice and your face all covered in blood and your – _everything_ – and okay, I was mixed up about what we were, before. But right now, I know this much. I'm not fixed. I'm just–"

His missing hand tries and fails to illustrate that with a gesture in Steve's direction, making him wobble unsteadily and tilt against the passenger chair.

Steve just leans his forearms on his knees and looks up at him the way he so often has in the past, like he can do better.

"Don't ask me to do that to you, Bucky." Then he gets up as if that was an end to all the hidden traps HYDRA left in his mind. "Come and get some air."

Outside, Steve heads back towards the landing pad and the night sky, so Bucky heads into the ruined building where there's nothing but his steps muffled by dust and grit and the occasional sound that could be cats or rats or both. It's good to stretch some of those damaged muscles before they get worse. By the time he hears footsteps, he's found a flashlight with a scrap of life still in and a faucet that runs clear after a bit. 

"Get over here," he says without turning. "You're going nowhere looking that way."

After a considering pause, Steve comes to him, stands by the sink and even holds the flashlight while Bucky cleans the dried blood off his forehead and around his eye and thinks that friendship's a pretty one-way street for Tony Stark if he can do worse to Steve than what Bucky did when he was pumped full of banned chemicals and getting the mettle electrocuted out of him on the regular for the best part of six decades. 

He seems easier, though. With every moment Bucky tends to him, the battle adrenalin and the persistent anguish of being in conflict recede. He watches Bucky's face while he works. 

"The Winter Soldier get called on to do a lot of field surgery then?" he asks, pointed but so soft that Bucky can't even rouse himself to argue. 

He turns his head obediently to let Bucky go gently over his busted right cheek.

"So I guess I'm coming with you," Bucky tells him. "Since you don't want to tell me where the serum-strength restraints are kept."

"You think you can make it?" 

He sounds concerned, but that kind of taunt is something Bucky remembers in his bones.

"I think I'll carry you down that damn mountain if you don't do something about your tone. A little punk like you. Don't make me prove it." 

The mirror's behind him. He doesn't know he's smiling until he sees the change in Steve's face, the rawness of it, the hope. 

The blood smears go down to his collar, dark and dried now. It's not hard to read what Steve's thinking, as Bucky squeezes out the rag and works with gentle persistence. His pulse is up, his attention keeps dropping to Bucky's mouth. 

Bucky traces the cloth over his left cheek, which was clean to begin with.

"If you're not sure, I'd say you should give it a chance." 

Steve meets his gaze frankly, thinking on it. "You were pretty cold about it, that first time."

He scrunches the cloth into his fist and lets his thumb take its place. 

"It took me a while to catch on, that's all. But when I worked it out, I made up for the delay. In here, anyway." He gestures to his temple. "I was an idiot. My timing was usually better than that."

Steve's smile turns the moment into something else. "Your timing was perfect, Buck. You never let me down." 

When he goes to step back, Bucky reaches out for him before he can think.

"Come and get something to eat first," Steve tells him with a soft, indulgent look. "You look like the next gust of wind is going to blow you down."

There's an old box of supplies in a storeroom he had passed, and in it Bucky finds a jacket that feels warm enough, so he shrugs it onto one arm and does his best to drape the other around him. Coming out of the quinjet in his civilian uniform, Steve breaks into a glare when he sees it, and squats down to pull the knife out of Bucky's right boot. It takes a few deft slices for him to strip all the insignia off it and toss the scraps into an oil drum before Bucky has to see what it is. He finds a piece of plastic pipe to fill out the empty sleeve and pins the whole thing across Bucky's chest so he looks – he hopes – more harmless and less like a damaged killing machine.

It's a steep walk down, on a treacherous dirt road, but there's the pretty nest of lights over the town and the salt air blowing in off the sea, and by the time they hit the coast road Bucky feels better than when they started, better than he has in forever. They find a tavern where the owner's father is willing to throw two more fish onto the dying coals for them and open a bottle of the wine from his cellar. 

It's the opposite of fancy, but it's still the weirdest of all the weird things that have happened to Bucky in the last two years, eating across from Steve at that little square table with a red checked cloth and a tea light in a saucer.

Steve comes back from the checkout desk with a key. 

"Three doors down," he says. "Doesn't get rented out much this time of year so he says don't expect too much."

"Does he know what happened to the last room I slept in?"

"Yeah," Steve says and steadies him as he gets up from the table. "I think he knows."

Damn his faith in people. Damn his stupid, stubborn faith. But Bucky goes with him to a flat little white weatherboard house that comes with one bed on a bare tiled floor and a plastic orchid in a glass soda bottle on the dresser. It's got four walls and no bars on the windows, which is everything he needs right now. 

He leans against the dresser while Steve unpins the jacket sleeve for him. He's taking his time, standing so close that Bucky can watch the slow swish of his eyelashes when he blinks. He puts the pipe next to the orchid and slides the jacket off Bucky's shoulders.

"So you want to try this?" he asks.

"If you wanna let me," Bucky tells him, thinking it can't be this easy after everything they've been through, it can't be. "Yeah. I really want to try this." 

The second time Steve kisses him is nothing like the first. Because Steve has more than twice the body mass of last time, and muscles that can hold a 600 horsepower helicopter on the ground, and yet he's kissing Bucky like he's made of spiderweb, never using his strength for his own advantage, never asking for more than what's right. He's kissing Bucky like someone he's sure of, though, not someone he has to hold there by force, and that's maybe the sexiest part of it all. 

Bucky gets his good hand under Steve's shirt, thumb just brushing the bare skin above his waistband, and lets it go on like that for a bit, lets himself fall under the spell of Steve's soft kisses, until there's an unexpected hot swipe of tongue that makes Steve pause as if he's done something wrong, broken the rules, and that's more than Bucky can stand. He fists his hand in Steve's shirt and kisses him hard, kisses him with all those months of wanting, groaning into it, and praying that Steve will do exactly what Steve does, which is pull him in around the waist and give it right back, until the little room is thick with the sound of heavy breathing and their wet mouths and the grate of the dresser's legs when Bucky finally finds a good dirty angle for Steve to grind into him. 

He's so lovely when Bucky leans back to look at him, flushed high on his cheeks, kind of excruciatingly turned on, just a little bit guilty and unsure, and that last part Bucky thinks he can fix. 

"Hey." He waits for Steve to meet his eyes and leans in to kiss him, gentle again, real romantic, and pulls back. He's still breathing hard, harder than he does after a fight, and Bucky thinks he has to get this right, for Steve. He loosens his grip and runs his fingers down Steve's breastbone, muscles on either side of it defined through the grey cotton, and back up again.

"I never thought about this, back in Brooklyn," he says. "But later on I had plenty of time to wish I had."

Steve smiles, easy again. "Oh yeah? I tried not to think about it at all. Except all the times I couldn't."

And then he's turning Bucky side-on without much effort and starting to snap open the clasps on his combat suit as easy as flicking a light switch. He frowns a bit at the jacket fastening, which is at the back where strangers have been putting it on him for years. Bucky can't get it off quick enough then, and Steve barely has time to unsnag it from the loose wires in his arm stump before he's got his fingers in the neck of Steve's shirt, pulling him towards the bed, keeping his hold until he's got Steve bare-chested too.

Lying across the bed, Steve pulls it back another gear, kisses Bucky like he does everything, giving it all he's got and present with every fibre of his being, holding himself up on one elbow to watch what he's doing, what he's doing to Bucky. It's so long since Bucky was a sight that anyone wanted to see that it makes him uncomfortable until Steve takes an interest in kissing his way over Bucky's chest while his palm skims the skin a bit lower, and that's good, that's perfect. Bucky doesn't want to say the things he said to girls, when he was twenty, when what he was in love with was beauty and adventure, so he strokes the back of Steve's neck instead, and watches that familiar golden head move over his body, and lets himself sink under it.

"Bucky?" he hears. "Buck?"

His good hand is shaking and he's kind of zoning out. It's just too much all at once, and no one has touched him except with a blow torch or a fist since he can't remember when. Suddenly he can't take any more of Steve touching him this way.

"All right," he says and flips Steve onto his back. "Let's see how you take it."

A few breaths later he's got Steve's jeans open and is doing his best to take him apart with his mouth. And yeah, it's not easy to find the angle for this while balancing on one hand, but he's got all that needle-assisted core muscle that had to come in handy for something good one day, and if it's trickier than he imagined, it's also more exciting to have Steve so delicate and sweet against his lips, then hitting the back of his throat just hard enough. And the way Steve responds is wilder than his wildest dreams. For someone who knows better than to raise his voice when he has right on his side, he's noisy like you wouldn't believe. He gets so loud going from gasps to groans that Bucky has to stop, laughing, and shush him until he blushes and reaches out to touch Bucky's wet bottom lip with a look that says maybe his imagination hadn't stretched this far, back in the day.

"Can you keep it together for five minutes?" he asks sternly, but in the end it barely takes him one before Steve's losing it, turning absolutely silent apart from one soft "oh" as Bucky sucks him over the edge. 

He leaves Steve to lie back while he shakes out the folded blanket from the end of the bed and pulls it over them both. Curled along Steve's side, he can watch the familiar profile of his face, the pretty eyes and mouth set over strong, masculine bones and think how different this all is from the rushed battlefield couplings of his imagination.

"Why didn't we do that back in Brooklyn?" Steve asks in a drunk sounding voice, and Bucky feels a disorienting stab of jealousy for his younger self, who Steve would have taken to bed without any of the complications: the busted up machinery, the treacherous memory gaps. But it all comes back to this. If he's going to ask Steve to do this with him, then he has to make it right. He has to find the strong parts left in him, and shore them up, and be someone who deserves to have everything Steve's given him this last day. 

"I told you," he says, pulling himself up to leave a kiss on Steve's chest. "I was an idiot. But it's not like that's news to you."

It takes his breath away, the smile that takes over Steve's face, the way he rolls them together. But then he's reaching down to stroke the front of Bucky's pants, squeezing gently and feeling his way.

"I don't need that."

Damn it, Steve's face is like a clear pool and he knows he just threw a dirty big rock in it. He never could say no to anything Steve really wanted. 

"Okay, okay. Just don't be–" Jesus it's harder to say than he thought, he can feel himself turning away. "Don't expect too much, alright?"

Steve expects everything, of course, patiently and with care, as he strips Bucky's pants back and kisses a line between his hips and settles over his thighs to get to work with his hands. Bucky's body's got a bit more spirit than he gave it credit for, perhaps, and when Steve spits into his palm like he's done this a hundred times before, he's hit by an electric jolt of arousal that doesn't flag a bit as Steve strokes him, watching rapt, like maybe this was something he thought about more, and when Bucky comes he bends down to catch it in his mouth so that Bucky finishes with his eyes squeezed closed and his good hand leaving a warp in the thin steel tubing of the headboard that they'll have to straighten out in the morning. 

He lies there, weightless, for a long while afterwards, nothing to break the silence except the soft rasp of breathing. 

When he opens his eyes, Steve's leaning back on his elbows at the other end of the bed, looking pretty pleased with himself.

Bucky shakes his head. "You never listen."

Shifting his feet, Steve rolls up to drop a kiss on his mouth and start throwing the decorative pillows on the ground so they can sleep. "I never listen," he agrees cheerfully. 

Later, when he's only half-awake, Steve's forehead curled against nape of his neck, he realizes what's missing. The ache that has been in him so long, permanent as a bone, knitted into his mind like scar tissue, the helplessness, the shame of long-thwarted resistance, so constant he'd become numbed to it, it's all gone. His mind feels blanked out by endorphins – that's blank like new snow on a grey city, a clean blanket. Not a page to be written on with someone else's orders. He hadn't remembered he could feel like this. 

_______

They're wiping him again. His arms are restrained and every muscle in his body is quivering, tensed to the absolute brink. He can't see – can't even open his eyes – he only knows where he is by the smell – the reprogramming room smells of decay, because he was never the only one they treated this way, he was just the only one with the resilience not to die from it. He can't even loosen his chest enough to draw breath. It must be one of those times there were a lot of glitches to clear out of his head, because it goes on and on until he hits that point where he starts to wonder if he's outlived his usefulness and they're going to finish him off this time. 

On the other side of that thought, he gets to a point he's never reached before, where all he thinks is _thank god_. He feels himself start to leave his body. He sags a little, then a little more, and then there's a voice saying, "Bucky, Bucky. Buck," and he's in bed, shivering all over, Steve's body half a cage and half an embrace over him, kisses in his hair between words. 

The grip on Bucky's wrist loosens just a little.

"You got it under control?" Steve asks.

He thinks, if it had been anyone but Steve, who has so many hooks in him he's practically a shadow, he could have shredded them along with the furniture before he knew what he was doing. He breathes in deep, and out. His mind's so blank he thinks the wiping must have worked, in another one of those delayed-release gifts that HYDRA left in his mind. But then he remembers the orchid on the dresser, the direction of the sea, the taste of Steve's mouth. 

"You nearly–" His raw throat gives out for a moment. "You nearly killed yourself in Red Hook Park, smoking a cigarette to impress Sally Malone."

Steve rolls off him completely, brightening. "You're half right. It was never Sally Malone I was risking my lungs for though. The water's hot."

It isn't by the time Bucky finishes up, cleaner than he's felt in weeks, but sick of having to do it all one-handed. When he comes out of the bathroom wearing nothing but the towel fisted in front of him, Steve looks pretty interested. 

"There's – ah – it's all a bit hard to reach right now." 

"I bet," Steve says agreeably, and takes the towel to swipe at Bucky's torso a little before he lets it fall to the ground and starts to lay a slow trail of kisses across his chest. 

"Look, I might not be –"

"Okay," Steve cuts him off, reaching the band of scar tissue around his shoulder and starting to kiss that too. "I thought we had that out last night."

It's impossible not to laugh at that, his blithe insistence that conquering anything from psychological torture damage to a magnitude ten earthquake is nothing but a matter of believing hard enough. It's even funnier because, if Steve believes it, he can't help believing it too, just a little bit. He tumbles Steve back onto the bed and starts tugging his clothes off and a few moments later he's got Steve's legs wrapped around him as they work up the most delicious wet heat between them. And that's more like something that might have showed up in his fantasies before, the way Steve looks when Bucky's grinding down against him, short-breathed and just a bit overwhelmed by it all. 

"Yeah?" Bucky says, and leans down to kiss the line of his jaw, then his waiting mouth. "This okay by you then?"

Steve moans into a slow, slick thrust, and Bucky pulls back from the kissing just to watch the alternate shadows of pleasure and need wash over his face. 

His eyes are closed when he sighs, "I didn't think I could have this."

And that's so hard to hear, after all the impossible things Steve has made happen for him in the last day alone, that Bucky makes a promise he's going to hold himself to no matter what. 

"Hey. Steve, look at me. Look at me." It takes a while, but his eyes flutter open, his gaze finds Bucky's and sticks. "As long as I'm breathing, you can have this. You hear me?"

It happens fast after that, Steve's hand sliding down in between them, his hot, steady grip, and then Bucky's the one who can't stand the intensity of want for those last few moments before it's over, and there's nothing in his head but pleasure.

"You look like you should be out on a fishing trawler," Steve says later, when he's finished buttoning up the worn checked shirt they dug out of the black plastic bag by the back door. 

"Wait till you see this then," Bucky tells him, and fishes out a knitted grey beanie which he pulls on low then tugs back up his forehead. 

Steve gives it an unnecessary adjustment that ends up with his hand cupping Bucky's cheek and an expression that's dangerously close to dragging them into round three. So Bucky steps away and goes to get the pin for his half-empty sleeve. 

"Sadly for you, pal, the squid fisher look isn't going to be sticking around for the summer in Wakanda."

"Can you blame me?" Steve asks later, when he's fastening everything in place. "You look like you again."

Bucky can't help it if the brightness in Steve's face makes him feel light, through the short, wet walk to the grocery store by the coast road. It lasts right up until he clocks three black SUVs, one after the other, heading for the dirt road they came down. That's right, he thinks. That's reality knocking at their door, just like it had to do sooner or later.

He takes his water bottle from the cashier and drops it into the new pack along with the other supplies, slings it over his good shoulder with a sense of purpose. 

"No," Steve says immediately, heading him off just outside the door.

"Come on. You know it. We're too easy to spot if we stay together." 

Steve looks out towards the water, jaw set, putting together some sort of impossible plan that stops them being separated.

So Bucky presses on. "They know about the Sokovian guy, or they will soon. You've got a better chance with them than I do. You only did one thing wrong." 

Contrary to the expression on his face, Steve's objection is practical. "What's your plan then? You can't ride a bike, not if it comes down to a chase. Even one of the boats needs two good hands." 

Bucky nods to the shop door, full of taped up paper inside the glass. "There's a bus. Looks like about six times a day in each direction. How do you think I kept under the radar the last two years? I get on a bus, and I look like an injured trawler man going to visit his folks. You said it yourself."

"Tony knows about your arm."

"Stark's still out in the wilderness somewhere." 

Bucky thinks he knows a bit about how guilt works, and if T'Challa's sense of injustice was strong enough to chase him all the way to Siberia, he can count on it to make sure they get a decent head start now.

When Steve reaches out to seat the pack a bit better over Bucky's bad arm, his objections are exhausted. "You better be there."

"Where else would I go? I got a lot of debts to pay. There's one guy in the world who owes me, and it's just my good luck he's the king of Wakanda. Now how much government cash you take off that jet?" 

Steve gives it to him, the whole lot. "You're gonna go up and talk to them, then?" Bucky asks him.

"I have to try." 

Of course he does. "Look after yourself then."

They can't afford to do anything to make them more conspicuous than they already are. Bucky takes a step back, then another, and then he makes himself turn around and walk away.

_______


	2. Chapter 2

When he's had to, Bucky's gone a bit over seventeen days without food and still roped his way up a 20 foot wall afterwards. He doesn't have to push himself quite that far, but he's in a pretty ragged state by the time he reaches the Wakandan border. It's diced up his grasp on himself, all this impermanence, one country after another, sleeping in snatches and never quite shaking the disorientation of the dream state. In Cairo he breaks the head of a guy who tries to steal his pack while he's dozing in a doorway. The man's out cold, blood on the pavement, a light comes on in a flat upstairs, and Bucky runs before he can find out if he's made himself a murderer again.

But he's got there on his own, and that gives him enough confidence that he takes it in his stride when he finds out he's missed Steve, who's gone off to stage a one-man rescue mission for the friends who stood by him in that fight at Leipzig airport.

He doesn't know T'Challa well enough for trust to be there, and on top of that there's the solemn apartness of leadership that sits on him, so Bucky only tells him half the story and leaves out the parts about how he wakes up in the fever of resurfacing memories more often than not, how he keeps hearing the trigger words in his dreams. 

He trusts something about the sister though, Shuri. A familiar combination of capability and recklessness, a stubborn fondness for the unpopular and the overlooked. That's where it all goes wrong.

It's only a minor shock, to track its effect on his neural pathways and map out where the worst of the damage is. But the reaction is like dropping right into a sinkhole of old pain. He doesn't even remember what he did to Shuri's lab. There's a gash in the palm of his hand afterwards, two of his nails torn, a stinging graze on his cheek, and an ache as hard as a baseball in his head that doesn't leave any room for thoughts more complex than _run_, or _fight, _ or _kill_. They tell him he tried to run, as if there was any chance he could get back across all those thousands of miles to Siberia. 

He's sitting on the floor of a cell, leaning against the cool wall behind him and thinking the thoughts that keep him inside his skin: Sarah Rogers, Rockaway Beach, Ziegfeld girls - when Steve gets back at last. 

His stride is purposeful and his voice is on the warning side of firm when he hits the corridor, saying, "Making it ten times worse is all that's going to do. Another cage? That's not how you rehabilitate someone who's been through –"

And then he's in the room, on his knees, bruised but whole, turning Bucky's wounded hand up to check the bandaging across the palm.

"They unlocked the door," Bucky tells him. "The day after it happened. I'm the one who made them shut me in." And then, before the too-muchness of it takes his voice away, he adds quickly, "You're here."

Standing in the doorway, T'Challa looks like he's on his last reserves of patience, and being a decent man doesn't mean he's about to put Bucky's human rights ahead of the lives of his people, so he makes himself get right to the point. 

"Turns out I can't handle electricity anymore. We found that out without anyone dying of it, so that's a plus, but see the thing is, Steve. They have cryo chambers here. Better than the ones I've been in. They can keep me knocked out until we know how to fix the damage." 

Steve looks floored for a few moments. "I don't get a say in this?"

"What they did to my head, no. You can't argue with that. It happened." He withdraws his hand from Steve's grip. "I'm tired of it. I'm so damn sick of not knowing when I'm going to lose it again. I don't want any more bodies on my conscience, Steve. I want to be able to look people in the eye again one day."

The way Steve darts a glare in T'Challa's direction, you'd think the decision had been his, but all he'd provided was the means. 

So Bucky looks up, employing his eyelashes and the downcast tilt of his head in a way he didn't know he remembered how to do. "I think I can handle a couple more days before I do it, though. If you've got the time."

He has to wait to hear it, but when Steve says yes, it's pretty clear he knows he's saying yes to more than just a few days of his time. 

The room they get is the one T'Challa moved out of when he took his father's place. It's wide enough to put a bowling lane across it and lit by clear globes set on stalks on the wall. When he sees the size of the bed, he knows Steve must have said something because he sure as hell didn't trust anyone here enough to breathe a word about how they ended up that flight from Siberia. 

Bucky sits on the bed, watching while Steve paces, watching as he washes his hands and face in the basin, and peers out the window at the stars, hands twitching in his pockets. He's jittery enough that Bucky starts to question his assumption that what they had that night in Achinos was the kind of thing you couldn't back away from afterwards. But just as the pacing starts to look like a delaying tactic, Steve scrubs the back of his hand over his face in a way that Bucky knows.

It's layers of fatigue and unrelenting pressure, piled on thick with no rest in between, and it makes Bucky wonder who's been taking care of him? Who's been guarding him against all the things he won't protect himself against? Sam has got his back, sure. He knows how to listen, but does he know when it's time not to listen? Does he stand up in those moments when Steve needs someone to overrule him and force him to do what his conscience won't let him?

"Come here, why don't you." There's got to be an hour or two left before sunrise. "Come and lie down."

He does, and he even, after making a clumsy ordeal of unknotting his shoelaces, lets Bucky get a pillow under his head. 

It's more than stress, the plea in his eyes. It's the heartsickness of irreconcilable conflict, of being unable to find a way ahead that doesn't involve doing wrong by someone. 

Bucky strokes his forehead like he has a memory of doing a long time ago, when Steve was miserable and sick and hurt everywhere. He traces the hairline, shadows the curve of his eyebrows, gently thumbs away the faint lines of worry. Steve's eyelids are starting to stick on every blink.

Then he rouses enough to say, "I didn't even need my shield," and raise his right fist to examine it, front and back, as if there could be blood on it still.

On the Raft yesterday, it would have been his own people he had to put on the ground. People just serving their country, doing their jobs, ordinary people like the two of them used to be, in a different life. If he can't change that fact, Bucky thinks the best he can do is banish it for a little while. 

He knees his way onto the bed and climbs over Steve's thighs.

"You got them out though," he says, working the button of Steve's pants free, and then the zip. "All of them, and that's all I want to hear." 

He takes it slow this time, looking to leave Steve with nothing in his head but pleasure for as long as he can manage. So he makes it last and lets himself linger, working up a taste for it, as Steve goes from soft, inarticulate noises to urgent, inarticulate noises, and it's not too long before those groans are starting to come from both of them because it's hot as hell having all that responsive length in his mouth, pressing into his throat just as far as he can take, then a little bit more. 

"They make you do this, Buck?" Steve asks, with a fierceness that reveals what he expects the answer to be. "Did they?"

A little drunk on the easy rhythm of his work, on the intimacy of Steve letting him do what he likes, Bucky couldn't be on a more different plane from this sudden, anxious outburst. 

He sits back on his knees and takes the chance to roll his shoulders, stretch out his back. 

"That all you wanna ask me?" he replies, low. "You oughta ask me if I ever did this before. With anyone. Ask me if I ever wanted to."

Steve doesn't ask, but his gaze sticks like a caress as Bucky bends back down and takes him apart. 

It must have had the effect he was hoping for, because he's got both of them under the covers before Steve mumbles something that Bucky has to make him repeat. 

"You. What do you want? How can I –"

When Bucky curls against his side, the wreckage of his arm tucked under him might as well have vanished. If there's a gentle buzz of arousal low in his belly, it's something he has a choice about. 

"This'll do," he says, and slides his good hand under Steve's shirt just in time to feel his lungs expanding to argue. "Don't get all contrary on me. You heard what I said."

"Bucky," Steve sighs, but that's as far as he ever gets, because it seems like Bucky was right, he's got no defences against the anesthetic powers of orgasm. Each breath comes slower, until he's dozing, until he's fully out.

And Bucky, who's had nothing to exert himself with these last few days except keeping himself together long enough to make this happen, Bucky gets the privilege of watching him sleep through almost five clear hours as the light creeps into the room.

The difference it makes takes his breath away. Steve wakes up with a deliberate, intensely focused energy, not a trace of yesterday's burdens. The look in his eyes puts butterflies in Bucky's stomach when he turns on his side to get them face to face.

"Hi Buck," he says, reaching out to push his hair back, running his fingertips down Bucky's cheek and then over his lips, so that Bucky's heart is already thumping up against his breastbone even before Steve rolls over him. 

It's the kiss he's been waiting two weeks for. Sweetness tipping into something hotter and more demanding. Steve's hand on his arm, those perfect broad shoulders curved over him as it goes on and on, unhurried despite the stiffening length he can feel against his hip. And then he takes the heat out of it and brushes little snowflakes of kisses over Bucky's cheekbone, his forehead, his eyelids. 

"I drove them crazy here, waiting for you," Steve tells him between kisses. "Tried not to think about all the things that could happen to you coming down through the Middle East."

He's moved down to Bucky's jaw, teeth scraping lightly over the bristle, little kisses dotted under his ear, but what makes Bucky's chest tight is how he pauses, eases off, lets the overwhelmingness abate into something he can bear. Bucky closes his eyes and breathes in the shelter of his arms.

"I came into Lebanon through the north border, in Akkar," Bucky says a bit dizzily. "Thought of you there. Once you get up out of the foothills it's all clean air and little snowmelt lakes and then miles of forest with no one in it."

Steve's nipping his way down his neck, into the hollow of his throat, hips lifting up so that Bucky can't help chasing the hot connection of it. Steve's laughing as he rebalances to get Bucky's shirt off and then his pants too, working with unthinking competence and authority.

"Only in Lebanon?" he asks as he pulls his own shirt over his head and puts his mouth back to work, kisses down Bucky's sternum tingling right through his chest.

"And at a kebab stall somewhere north of Aqaba, if I remember right," Bucky tells him because he can't weigh Steve down with the truth, which is _every waking breath_. "Or it could have been Port Sudan."

Steve's mouth is merciless after that. It's the sheer focus of him that's Bucky's undoing. The way he picks up the tiny electric reaction to his teeth grazing Bucky's nipple and seizes on it, alternating the tight tug of a bite with his hot tongue until Bucky's bones are practically melted away with pleasure. The way he knows Steve would stop if he asked him to, or keep doing it all day, whatever he wanted. He's so worked up from all the grinding against Steve's abs and the meticulously applied suction that he comes almost as soon as Steve's hand wraps around him, with a blackout intensity that leaves his ears ringing. 

He's clean, but still a bit out of his head, when Steve rouses him by ruffling his hair. He feels so light all over, with that blank page feeling again, that it's almost a surprise when he goes to reach out and find one hand bandaged and the other not there at all.

"Can't take care of you properly," he frowns. "Not like this."

But Steve just grins, looking satisfied, the predatory appetite he woke up with apparently sated somewhere along the line. "That's all you got, is it?"

Just now, even getting out of bed is a step further than he wants to go, and Bucky lets a sigh say it for him. 

The way Steve's watching him is expectant. "Right," he goes on. "Whatever wires got crossed in your head, you're straightening them out. Every day. When I pulled you out of that river, you weren't the same person you are now."

Bucky throws his arm over his eyes, only now seeing where this is going. There are some things that he can't seem to make Steve understand, as if his tongue fell into a foreign language every time, but he's got to try, got to keep trying.

"Just because you can't see–"

"I know you, Buck."

If Steve can say that while he's lying here, naked, the blasted remains of a lethal weapon unmistakable where it hangs from his shoulder, then he has to try harder. 

"Here's how it is. It's like – you're like a window." He shifts his arm to gesture vaguely in the direction of the light. "When I'm up close, it's like I can see the things you remember. A bit blurry, but I can kind of see the person that I used to be. But when you're not around, it's – it's like someone closed the shutters. And believe me, I've got a lot of years of things you don't want to be alone in the dark with." 

He can see Steve's processing that. Even at his most block-headed, he's always listening. Bucky thinks he can see a way to make him hear. 

"And that's why I gotta do this. I don't wanna be walking around with these thoughts in my head that I didn't put there myself. Not until I know how to get on top of it."

He fishes his shirt out from the bedclothes, wrestles it on, starts to look for something to put on his lower half. "I've done it a hundred times before."

He has to backpedal, the way that puts even more horror in Steve's expression. "Not literally, but a few, all right. And it's not going to be seventy years like it was for you. I made a choice to do it this time."

He finds Steve's navy shirt, the one he wore on the rescue mission yesterday, and throws it at him. 

"And when I wake up, I won't be on my own." It feels low, using the certainty of Steve's own loyalty to persuade him, but then this whole business feels low, the ugly burn of knowing he's unable to live up to Steve's expectations this time. It feels low, but it works, he knows by the accusing clench of Steve's brows. 

"Come on. They left us breakfast. You gotta be half-starved."

Bucky eats the fruit off the plate, because he can't help the way his mind associates the crunch and the sweetness with being free. It was stew, in Siberia. Meaty, gelatinous with fat and marrow boiled out of the bones, and good for concealing whatever else they wanted to put into him. He has a memory of one time it filled him with unnatural rage, so fierce it wiped everything out of his head until the moment he woke up with electricity burns down his arm and blood on his mouth; another time it did something to his inner ear canals that left him completely unable to get off the floor for what seemed like a week.

"You really never did that?" Steve asks, crunching a cold piece of toast between his teeth.

Bucky has to replay the question in his head, and the darted glance that went with it, before he catches up. 

He shrugs. It doesn't count if it was in the war, with guys whose first names he never knew, just to clear the horror out of his mind for five damn minutes. It doesn't count if he can't tell the difference between camp-bed fantasy and gritty, short-lived reality, and doesn't care to, either. 

"Not like that. Not even a bit like that." 

There's eggs, there's a fried flatbread filled with meat. There are seven kinds of fruit; he picks up an arc of pineapple, a slice of melon and they taste as good as the first day he got here. 

By day, the room has strong light filtered through vine leaves and a view over gardens which they barely look at.

It could be mid-afternoon. They're wrestling lightly on the bed, half-dressed, his knees hemming in Steve's thighs. There's no heat in it, just a directionless physical appreciation that Bucky's head doesn't know how to process, but wants to learn. He leans over where their hands are joined, wielding the height advantage of his position to see if he can force Steve's arm back. Steve gives way a little, lets his bicep strain under the weight of it as Bucky shifts his center of gravity further up Steve's body before he overbalances. 

They touched before, in their younger bodies. Leaning into each other over everyday things. His grasp steady and deliberate when Steve was taking himself too lightly and needed to be grounded. When he remembers one of those times, he plays it on repeat in his head until it sticks fast so he can't lose it again. But there was an invisible limit to those touches: he can only see it now that it's behind them. 

It's so easy now. Bucky feints back, presses forward, and Steve is ready to catch him again, laughing so that Bucky can feel it in his knees and thighs. This is right on the edge of the amount of human contact Bucky thinks he can stand – he fought back with real panic when Steve experimented with rolling them – but as usual Steve seems to make himself the exception to every rule.

He detaches their grip so he can touch Steve the way he used to dream about, puts his hand over Steve's heart purely because he likes the feel of his muscles flexing as he moves his free hand. 

When Steve's fingers trace the scars at the base of his weaponized arm, it causes a shocked and wary shift in his breathing. Urges that are normally suppressed in Steve's presence are telling him to lash out, to destroy. The light touch continues down the ridge of one of the undamaged metal plates.

"Does it hurt?"

Bucky breathes in deep, right to the bottom of his lungs. 

"Only when I have to use it for weight-bearing." He catches Steve's wrist and moves it away. "There's a lot of anchors hooked in me deep, and the muscles they're attached to still have nerves in."

Steve's thoughts go on touching him the way his fingers were.

"They could fix it, here. Even give you something better."

It's true, and he even kept Shuri's schematic sketch of it in his pocket for a day, before the disaster in her lab.

"Yeah, I'm gonna work out my head before I let them put a weapon back on me."

The difference between yesterday and now is absolute. Steve doesn't argue this time. He sits up slowly, letting Bucky give way this time. He kisses Bucky's throat and, damn, Bucky feels that down to the base of his spine. 

Tingling in his bones from that one kiss, Bucky hooks his arm around Steve's neck and lets the realisation in. Fixing himself isn't just a matter of settling all the wrongs his hands have done. It's something he needs to do for Steve, too. 

"What do you want?" he asks, later in the day, when Steve shifts the mood heatedly with a firm grip on his waist. 

His fingers tighten, his thumb strokes. "Can I put my hands on you again?"

Making Steve put himself first is a battle that not many people have the endurance to get into. The obstacle is partly a deep sense of duty from the times he was born in, partly a towering sense of pride he won't ever admit to in words, that's the only flaw Bucky could ever see in him. Bucky fought that battle harder than anyone, even Sarah, but looking back with all the things he's learned about influence and resistance, he could have fought smarter and won more often if he'd known better than to tackle it head on and make it an argument. 

Bucky shifts the emphasis: "I'm asking what do _you_ want?"

But that's fruitless too, because it turns out that what Steve wants is to take Bucky's bed-rumpled clothes off, real slow, and make him wait through an afternoon of roaming kisses and curious little bites and outright nuzzling. And _then_ he wants to use his hands. 

"It's better when I touch you," Steve murmurs against the inside of his hip bone, and his head is too dreamy to know which way to take that. 

It's past twilight when Steve gets up to put the lights on, and says, frowning, "Is this okay? Us being here?"

Steve looks around the room as if noticing its scale for the first time, contrasting its generous floor area with the humble person he still thinks he is. 

"Do you mean that we're here together? I think it's a bigger deal that we're not Wakandan royalty," Bucky tells him. "They're private about that kind of thing here. But that goes both ways. There's no judgment, either."

If Steve looks even more uncertain, it's probably because he doesn't feel the concept of atonement as acutely as Bucky does. 

"T'Challa's the only person in all of this who's got a conscience. He wants to make it right with me and you, and this is the best way he can see right now. What we've got to do, Steve, is not take advantage." Bucky gives that a few moments to sink in. "You get that, don't you? He's giving us shelter. But all I am to his people right now is a head full of land mines that could go off at any moment."

They're more similar than either of them could see, T'Challa and Steve, right down to their unbudgeable moral certainties and their keenly felt honor ever so slightly gilded with vanity. Bucky thinks he's finally put this thing on a level Steve can't argue with.

"Yeah, Buck," Steve says, not looking at him. "I get it."

It's day again. They're lying on the bed, his head in Steve's lap, talking about the Dodgers games in Brooklyn they used to scam their way into, and if Bucky can't remember the plays, he retains a general sense of atmosphere, the hungry noise of the crowd, the smell of roast peanuts.

After the '42 season opener, it falls quiet. 

"Tell me some of these things we did, in those memories you had," Steve says into the silence. 

The first time he'd asked that, yesterday, Bucky had just shaken his head, annoyed, because he didn't need those old fantasies anymore. But the second time he hears it differently, like maybe Steve is trying to ask for something they haven't done yet, and that makes his blood hot, thinking about that. 

He rolls back up Steve's thigh, cheek a couple of inches from indecency, so he can watch Steve's reaction. 

"You wanna know whether I thought about you putting it to me?" He catches the rapid blink of Steve's discomfort at the sudden specificity. "Whether I liked to have you on top of me? Or the other way round?" He can feel the shift of Steve squirming faintly under him. "That's it then? You want me to tell you how much you liked it that way?" He could lie here all morning just drinking in the sheer erotic energy of him, a man like Steve with so many rivers left to cross, so clearly choosing Bucky to be the one to cross them with. "You want to find out if you like it as much as I imagined?"

Truth is, Bucky's pretty sure he imagined it both ways, any way at all, it didn't matter so long as Steve was giving him a part of himself that no one else ever got close to. But he can feel how near to the mark he is, in the heat around him, in the way Steve won't quite meet his eyes. He pulls himself up and kisses Steve's shoulder like they did this all the time. 

"Go and wash up for me then. Come back when you're real neat and clean."

He goes for the pack he brought from Achinos that's got the trawlerman shirt and the beanie in it, as well as a few things he took special pleasure in spending the US government's money on as he passed through the tourist towns on the Turkish coast. He's got all the motivation he needs to rip the bandage off his hand with his teeth, leaving a thin strip of tape over a wound that's healing as quick as ever. 

Steve's focused like a dream while Bucky's fingers are in him, working hard to relax and let it happen, but breathing out on a sigh sometimes like it's better than he thought, and when he grabs Bucky's wrist to twist him back onto the angle he just left and lets out an absolutely electric moan when Bucky gets it right, well Bucky didn't think he could get any more invested in what they're doing, but there's nothing he wouldn't do to hear that sound again. 

Steve gets off the bed and bends over it so Bucky can do it standing up, and what it loses in romance it gains in sheer pornographic sizzle because nothing in his wildest dreams had prepared him for the sight of Steve bent like that, with his long, muscled legs apart, all slicked up and just waiting for Bucky to get inside him. He drops down on one knee to kiss the hard muscle of Steve's back and thighs, slips his fingers back in until Steve sighs for him again, and just waits for his knees to get strong enough to support him through this. And then he's lined up against the hot, slick dip of Steve's entrance, and then he's pressing that cinch of muscle open, and as his dick passes inch by inch through that tight heat it rewrites everything he thought he knew and liked about fucking. 

He makes himself count to ten, backwards, and gets to five before he has to shift a little, out and in, just another taste of that mind-blowing, willing clench. He counts another five and does it again, and after that he's the one who can't keep a lid on the noise. _Steve, _ he hears himself say like he was choking on it, pushing back in, good and slow. _Steve, you're perfect. I don't want anyone else. _

He thinks it's a good kind of quiet on Steve, but he wants to be sure. He touches Steve's shoulder blade, runs his thumb over it. "Okay?"

There's a delay of a few more slow thrusts and then Steve breathes out, "There's so much of you," and wilts just a little bit more into the tumbled bed covers so that Bucky can slide into him as easy as a kiss. And he doesn't come from it, not quite, but afterwards, he watches Bucky take him in his mouth again, and strokes his cheek while he does it, and he doesn't last long before he's coming with a ragged gasp that says he still doesn't expect it to be this good.

When they're back on the bed together, he just pulls Bucky's forehead against his and clenches his fingers in his hair to hold him there. Bucky closes his eyes and says _Yeah. I know, I know, _ because they've got this whole glorious day left and he wants years, he wants a whole fucking lifetime right now. 

What he can have is this. He wraps himself up in Steve's arms and tracks the leaf shadows slipping down the far wall.

"Tell me about one of your missions," Steve asks quietly after a while. 

"No," Bucky snaps, turning on his back so they can have this out eye to eye. "I don't want to talk about any of it. Ever."

Steve leans up to kiss his mouth, his throat, and deliberately down his chest and onto the metal plates of his arm.

"It's in your head though, whatever you do. Talking it out is better. They say." He rests on Bucky's chest and just looks at him a bit. "It won't change anything for me. You've gotta know that."

Bucky lets those leaf shadows move quite a bit further before he takes a breath and says, tentatively, "Some of them were criminals themselves, or close to it. Those ones weren't so bad. And I did it neat. I always did it like a professional. If I could." There's no reply from Steve, and it's not even clear whether he's listening, so Bucky goes on. "Other times – some of them were ordinary people and I never knew what they did to get me assigned to them. Maybe they joined the wrong protest movement, or their father crossed someone high up. Those ones–" He stops for a while and tries to exhale the panic out of his chest. "You wouldn't believe it but they died just as easy, the innocent ones. And it wasn't hard at the time. But now." He stops again until his voice steadies. "I see them all the time. I don't even have to close my eyes."

A while later, Steve pushes himself up and says, "Sam's a professional at this. He'd help you." 

Bucky can't help a snort. "He pretty much hates me." 

"He's not like that."

"Yeah? And when you told him I'd be waiting for you here, did he give you a little bunch of roses and say _Tell him I said to get well soon?" _

Steve rolls off him, exasperated. "He's a good guy."

Bucky gives it a moment to pass. "It's not about Sam." He twists in to kiss Steve's ear, takes his time to bite the lobe gently. "You'll never get how much it's not about Sam." 

"Would you talk to him? If I brought him here?"

Bucky thinks how they only have hours left now. He touches Steve's cheek, turns his face. "Don't bring him here. Don't bring anyone here. Can I ask for that?"

Steve's eyes are full of fond reproach, but he says, "You don't have to ask."

Then he rolls a little and lifts himself over Bucky, works one knee then the other between Bucky's legs, and settles his weight down. 

"Huh," Bucky says dumbly as his he starts to get instantly hard under all that carefully wielded muscle, and then Steve goes for his mouth, kisses even slower than his hips are working.

That's another half-hour gone, and Bucky doesn't regret a second of it. 

Shuri comes in the afternoon with four vials for blood tests. 

The ritual of it's so familiar that Bucky's got his shirt back off and dropped into a chair before he's thought about it. The needle and the doctoring are finer than he's used to, he's not strapped down, but otherwise it's the same. He clenches his fist absent-mindedly to speed it up. The second vial's half-full before he catches Steve's expression.

"What? Like they never did this to you, Captain America." It's got to be his thousandth time or more. They could have filled an army of winter soldiers with what he gave them. "And you with the original recipe in your veins, not some reverse-engineered HYDRA knock-off."

"They had to ask first," Steve says, as horrified as if they'd taken a kidney or an eye from him. 

"Sergeant Barnes," Shuri asks without missing a beat, "May I have your permission to test your blood for consistency and composition?" She switches in the next vial and labels the old one, then meets his eyes. "Or would you rather take your chances and find out what happens when an ice cube the size of a peanut hits your heart muscle?"

"Yeah," he tells her, "we'll be taking all the safety features on this one."

He likes that she's drawn to all the broken things in him, but with an unabashed curiosity that could never be confused with pity. The tape she puts over the needle prick fits as lightly as a new skin layer.

"What's that?"

"Advanced technology," she tells him, still with a straight face. "You're fasting from here on in. Did I mention? You'll thank me when you come out the other side with your stomach intact. And don't drink too much water, it swells the walls of the blood cells. Very aging at best, and at worst–"

He manages to discourage her with his eyes, because the way Steve's got his arms folded over himself looks like contained panic. 

"It's safe though, right?"

She follows the direction of his gaze until she gets it. "Yes, this is a well-tested procedure. You will, unfortunately, come out of it exactly the same person as you went in."

He thinks that maybe he needs to apologize again, for what he did to her lab, when she smiles. 

"But from that moment on, it gets better. Just give me a chance to spend some real time on your scans, build up a working model. If you've come this far by yourself, I can get the rest of what they did out of your head." She leans in and drops her voice. "But remember, I never said it would be easy."

When she's gone, Steve is still sitting at the chair by the windows, closed in on himself. Bucky goes over to join him and – hell, sometimes he looks in Bucky's eyes like he could claw his way in there and drag all the past out with his bare hands.

"They built me a replica pre-war bedroom to ease me into it, and I still put a hole in the wall when I woke up." Steve's face is twisted with frustrated emotion. "These animals were hurting you this whole time and I didn't even know."

"Yeah," Bucky tells him calmly. "You pulled me out of that."

"And then our people tried to lock you up again. I can think of twenty names who should be putting themselves in that chamber before you should. You never had a choice."

Steve launches up out of the chair and starts pulling him toward the bed. "Give it to me again. I want to feel you." But it's sad and urgent, the way he tears his belt open. 

"Steve." Bucky puts a hand out to stop him. He's got one job today and he almost screwed it up. "You know what I'd like? I'd like to watch a movie. Something they would have showed at the cinema with the loose window in the basement – one of the ones we saw when we were kids. I want to see a movie. Is that something we can do here?"

The phone Steve pulls out is sleek but weighty, a solid Wakandan adaptation of Stark's ultra-minimalist designs. They watch one movie, then another, the screen in his hand while Steve curls around him, enclosing him sideways so Bucky can lean against his stomach and feel the laughter behind him. In the long, joyful scene with Harpo Marx stalking his own reflection, he blinks an unexpected tear from his eye and thinks, for the first time, that it's true after all, that he's going to be okay, eventually. 

"You wanna get something to eat?" he asks when the second movie's done. "Just because I gotta lay off doesn't mean you have to go hungry too."

Steve reaches up to tuck a strand of Bucky's hair behind his ear. 

"I thought I already told you what I want." 

Bucky's heart actually stutters, hearing it put like that. 

"Well, all right then," is all he manages to say, shifting around onto his knees and looking down at the patient length of Steve stretched across the bed, no idea where he even wants to start.

If his mouth goes dry watching Steve strip unhurriedly out of his shirt and pants, it's nothing to the way it hits him when he takes the plastic tube from Bucky's hand and reaches behind himself with his fingers all slick with grease to get himself ready. Isn't that the purest essence of Steve, getting familiar with what needs to be done, and doing it? 

"Better this time?" Bucky asks, his thoughts starting to feel addled with more physical pleasure than his body's had to process since forever, and getting that feeling again from yesterday morning of being nothing but a very willing observer in the spectacle of Steve taking exactly what he wants. 

Steve just frowns up at him, lips parted with his hand still working behind him. "I thought you'd have your clothes off by now." He rolls a little, opening up a view that sends a jolt of arousal through Bucky, head to toe, and gets him tugging his shirt over his head with sudden urgency. "And no, your fingers felt better, but this gets us there quicker." 

Bucky's palms are tingling as he reaches for a damp washcloth from the morning that's hopefully got a clean patch on it somewhere for Steve to wipe his fingers on. In a matter of moments after that, he's on his back, Steve tugging his pants over his hips and dropping them off the side of the bed. His thoughts turn to static as Steve straddles him and sinks down, and when they get lucid again it's to the breathtaking thought that Steve can touch him like this, and he can touch Steve too, which he does to the most heartfelt erotic groan he's gotten to hear so far. 

"Bucky," Steve says, over and over as he works the connection between them, slow and steady with all the power in his thighs. The most Bucky can do is keep his fingers moving nice and tight as he looks up at all that raw strength moving over him, thinking how it gets easier every hour to bear, and harder to part with, the feeling of Steve being in his space, blanketing him with his attention.

When the watching starts to drive him crazy, he pulls himself up and they're kissing, Steve's steady rhythm stilling as he gives himself over to Bucky's mouth, bending down into it as he cups the side of Bucky's face with a hand gone damp with sweat. If he knew in his bones that there'd be no half-way with Steve, it's a whole other dimension to feel it now, to know there's not a thought in his head that isn't Bucky's, to recognize in the momentary withdrawal that all he's doing is looking in himself to see if there's anything else he hasn't given over already.

When Bucky starts up a slow, quickening rhythm with his hand, Steve's hips match it, grinding down as deep as he can go. He clings to the precipice a long time, holding back, both of them half-kissing and half panting into each other's mouths, and then Steve puts on a burst of speed and gives a cry like a sob and they're coming, together, and Christ alive, Steve's body, so strong and hot around him, the pleasure's like a whirlpool sucking him down. 

The intensity of it leaves him shaky-kneed through the shower he takes afterwards, hazy through the snack he makes Steve eat as the sun goes down, and completely defenceless against the bitter-sweetness of climbing back into bed together for the last time. He lets Steve cuddle up behind him, tangling their legs together and leaning over for another kiss, and another, that never quite seems to be the last. It's late when they fall asleep, wrapped up in each other. 

It's still late when he wakes up to a general feeling of distress. Steve's grip around his chest has grown tight. He shifts a little to let Steve know he's awake, and waits it out.

"You were everywhere," Steve tells him softly, kissing his shoulder in the dark. "That week you stayed with me, after you gave up your lease. The bathroom smelled of your pomade, your uniform was hanging on the closet door. I could hear you humming dance hall songs while you shaved. You were everywhere, and in two days you were going to be gone."

Bucky thinks of that strange, fierce kiss, and wonders how it all would have turned out if Steve had let him walk out that door and go off to the war without any inkling of what was in his heart. 

"You found me again though. Every time, Steve. You keep on finding me."

He drowses off again without getting an answer.

It's early light when he wakes up to a room full of colorless shadows. 

Steve is sitting in the corner of the bed, against the wall, hunched over drawn-up knees. Bucky's immediate impression of tension, weariness, gives him a premonition of what's about to happen.

Drawing a heavy breath, Steve says, "I'm staying here. If that's what it takes. I'm going to look after you. The whole time I've been with you, you've been fine. And if that changes, well you'll have to go through me before you can wreck another research lab."

He doesn't mention all the things he'll be neglecting, while he's appointing himself Bucky's new 24/7 handler, but they're there, weighing down his words. 

"You don't have to put yourself in that freezer. You're a prisoner of war, not a lab specimen."

"Come here," Bucky says. "I mean it, Steve. Come here."

Eventually he unfolds himself from his cramped corner position and stretches back out at Bucky's side, facing him. What Steve's offering him so earnestly is half of himself, a corrupted half that will eat itself away with shame until there's nothing left for Bucky to recognize. Steve with his principles rationalized away as neatly as SHIELD or HYDRA could have wished. Steve guarding him round the clock while soldiers with half his strength and twice his integrity throw their bodies between civilization and whatever new threat it faces. Steve with his moral steadfastness ground down into pragmatism, just like all his opponents have wanted to see since childhood, and all it took to reduce him to that was Bucky. 

And still, for a moment, Bucky just touches his cheek and lets himself imagine this is something he can have.

"I only just got you back," Steve says, choked, into the half-light between them.

"I know," Bucky tells him, and strokes the hair back from his temple. 

"It's not right, Bucky."

"I know that too." 

Under his fingers, he thinks he can feel Steve's anguish easing up a bit. He breathes slow, keeps stroking.

"I don't want to let you go," Steve whispers.

"Me neither." When he tugs gently at the back of Steve's neck, he comes, bending in until his face is against Bucky's throat, arm tightening around him. He's asking more of Steve than he's asking of himself, he knows that. For him, the time will pass like a nap, while Steve carries all the uncertainty for them both. "But I'm doing it anyway."

Steve breathes out, long and hard. That's it right there, the hardest moment Bucky has to endure, thinking about what he's doing to Steve. 

"And you've gotta let me, buddy," Bucky goes on. "That's what you've gotta do."

"I know," Steve says, sounding drained, pressing mindless kisses into the base of Bucky's throat. "I know." Then he rolls them a little so he can rest his head on Bucky's ribs, and that's how they spend what's left of the night. 

The light comes into the room, bringing the color with it. When the last dark corners are gone, Bucky drops a kiss into Steve's hair.

"Now come and help me get ready. I want to look right for you when I wake up."

In the shower, Steve's hands are focused as ever, sometimes on the task at hand and just as often on a random flex of muscle that captures his fascination. Bucky's had a lifetime of people touching him with the thoughtlessness of turning a key in an ignition, or chambering a new round of ammunition. Steve's touches are like everything Steve does for him: tiny, ephemeral gifts that he can keep in his head for good. New memories that stick and hold firm, that don't need to be guarded. Each one forging healthy new neural connections that strengthen the weakened tissue of his mind. He hardly recognizes the half-human he was in Bucharest, in Siberia, who thought he might be too far gone to save. He'd tell all this to Steve, if he thought he could put it in words. Instead, he turns in Steve's arms. There's a trickle of suds in the corner of his mouth when they kiss. 

"I thought I wanted you," Steve murmurs, mouthing over the wet skin of Bucky's neck. "Back in Brooklyn."

"You thought?" Bucky says, muddled, because what he remembers of that first kiss seemed pretty conclusive. 

Steve's kisses get harder. "I was just a kid. I didn't know what that meant. I was so torn up with the thought of losing you." 

With an effort, Bucky pulls himself out of the hot fog of craving that the press of their bodies is working up, hearing something important in all of that. "And now? Steve?"

The water darkening Steve's hair and eyelashes and sheening his pale skin makes the blue of his eyes almost too lovely to bear. "You're right," he says, arms around Bucky going loose at last. "I do keep finding you again. I can do it one more time." 

When they kiss, it's lost its frantic edge. 

"Well," Bucky tells him, soft. "This time I'll be finding you, too."

They do it up against the shower wall, afterwards. Bucky's forehead against the steamy tiles. Steve saying _Bucky, oh, _ against his shoulder just from the feel of his two fingers working into the tight, unready muscle of him. There's a lot of Steve to take in, but he goes slow, letting out frustrated little gasps of breath into Bucky's hair. For a moment he thinks he's not going to be able to take it, but then the overwhelmingness tips over into something infinitely more peaceful. With his good arm braced on the wall, his body relaxes into Steve's tight grasp around his waist and lets it happen, as Steve eases partway out of him and slides back in. They fuck in the steam like that, slow and deep, until he's half-hard and Steve's moving inside him as easy as anything, and then Steve wants to ease them apart and turn him around, press him back against the wall with his legs around Steve's waist, just his arm around Steve's neck holding him up. It's unbearably good like that, clinging to Steve for dear life while Steve kisses his face and sighs into his mouth and groans out little broken, hungry phrases. He comes when Steve decides it's time, shocked by the sure touch of Steve's fingers, the grip that's already learned just what he needs to get him there. It takes both their strength to hold him up afterwards, softly laughing against the wall. 

He lets Steve dress him, with all the kisses and detours that entails. Steve's hands are gentle toweling the water out of his hair; his brush strokes are patient and good. Then they open the windows and breathe in the warm air until it's time.

_______

T'Challa doesn't waste any words on an apology, but it's there in the way he wants to walk Bucky down to the lab, watches him slip up onto the bench and lingers like there's something he was waiting for. 

"You look after him," Bucky says, as if he hadn't already seen it happening with his own eyes. "Give him something to do. You make sure he makes up with his team, and take care he doesn't get himself killed. Because when you pull me out of there, I'm going to need him."

There's something amused in the king's dark eyes, like he's delighted to be given such a simple task next to the more intractable burdens of statecraft. He even laughs.

"What?"

"His plan was to stay out of your way, when he first got here. He thought he was influencing you too much. Not letting you heal in your own way."

And there he is, coming straight-legged and purposeful down the corridor. 

"Don't listen to him. I always grew in the same direction," Bucky says. Steve is wholly composed when he steps into the room, all his doubts put away, ready to make it easy. "Yeah, same as ever. Remind him he's not as important as he thinks he is. He needs to hear that sometimes."

T'Challa's voice drops low. "It's hard to live up to. A man who never has doubts."

For a moment, Bucky finds himself scrutinising him as he leaves, thinking maybe the mantle of king doesn't sit on him as easy as he makes it seem.

Then Steve is there. 

"Are you sure about this?" he asks, business-like, with no trace of the morning's grief. He lets Bucky say that he is. 

There's a moment when he's been strapped in place in the cryo chamber, when the technicians seem to withdraw abruptly into their tasks, giving them space. Steve steps forward, hesitates, puts his hand over Bucky's heart. For a while he just watches his thumb stroking idly over the cotton. 

"I let you go too easy before," he says, low. "It's not going to happen again." 

When he looks up, it's all in his eyes, everything.

"You punk," Bucky replies as his body reacts to the touch and the promise with all the potency of decades of thwarted craving heightened by some pretty steamy recent memories. "How d'you think they're going to get me frozen when you're doing that to me?"

When Steve steps back, quickly, he looks equal parts flustered and pleased, and the sadness has gone. 

Bucky gives him a nod, slow and sure. "I'll see you soon." He takes a moment to center himself, then closes his eyes. 

It's nothing like HYDRA's system, nothing at all. The glass slides shut with a faint hiss. The mist encloses him in a cloud. His first two breaths are like winter in Central Park, clean with the smell of snow, and his third breath doesn't come at all. 

_______

**Epilogue**

There's a plume of flame and dust where another rogue satellite hits a church, followed by an awful crumbling of masonry and timber supports. Steve holds his breath for a moment until he sees Wanda walk out of it through a passageway of her own making that collapses behind her. The fire over the old town is shrouding half the city in thick smoke; he can just make out Sam's wings as he swoops out of it, heading for an enemy combatant taking aim on a rooftop. Up above, trails of flame mark the path of at least two more projectiles heading their way.

And all of a sudden Steve's had enough. 

The walls of the old power substation are brick, but it takes two blows from Steve's fist to warp the iron of its door enough to make a gap he can hook his fingers under, and one gritted-teeth pull to make its corroded hinges give way completely. There's a bunker downstairs that's the most likely home of the locator beacon that Shuri's tech had triangulated to this block, the one that's pulling these old HYDRA legacies from the sky and weaponizing them against the city. He doesn't bother to look for it. His two hands are more than enough to tear the place apart until it's crushed into history.

In less than a minute, the whole place is rubble and the airborne attack is over. Steve thinks he can feel a sweat just starting to break out across his hairline. 

"Lost the joy of battle there, Cap?" Hawkeye asks, dropping down into the remains of the substation, while Steve is shifting a wooden beam to clear a path back to where he came in. "Or just got something better to be getting back to?"

It sounds like teasing until Steve catches the knowing quirk in his mouth – Clint, who never talks about his family, never so much as speaks their names in the workplace. "Makes a difference, right?" he adds, and glances over his shoulder towards the dwindling smoke clouds. 

That's the moment Steve gets it, thinking of Bucky's painstaking recovery, the daily work of reliving the cruelest things that were done to him exacerbated by the lesser humiliation of having to put himself in other people's hands, and the dogged way he stands up and gives it his best, every hour of every day; thinking of how each time they meet there's more in Bucky that he recognizes, and more he can only stand back and admire for the first time, from the good heart he fell in love with, to the bottomless store of courage and resilience he'd never expected to find. 

It's not the same as it used to be, for Steve. It's not the same now that he's doing the things he does for someone, instead of just for everyone.

"Yeah," he says, half to himself. "I guess it does."

**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to Doro for the clear and thorough beta, and Vaysh for the advice on geography.
> 
> This is the first story I started writing in this fandom. I meant to write an edgier story, full of traumatic memory loss and misunderstanding. But then I let these two hurting characters get in a room together, and suddenly it was four times the length and the softest thing I've ever written. This is basically my love letter to the whole Stucky fandom. Because the tenderness that took over this story is pretty much just a manifestation of the blooming feelings that a month of reading spectacular writing had left me with.


End file.
